Easter
Sunday: March 23, 2008: on the last day of his
sixties, David Irving attends morning
serviceat his local church, the Twelfth-Century St
James the Less, near Windsor. He says:"This church is 400 years older than the United
States, and we're both in pretty good shape for
the future."[click
image to download high-resolution
picture]

Feature

Filled to
bursting

The
controversial author David Irving turns
seventy

THE case of David
Irving raises a host of questions. For a
start, there is the problem of where to place
him. As early as the late nineteen-sixties, when
Rolf Hochhuth enraged Britain with his
play "Soldiers" based on Irving's theories, a
play which blamed Winston Churchill with
having brought about the death of the exiled
Polish prime minister General
[Wladyslaw] Sikorski
in 1943, The Daily Telegraph editor's
office directed that David Irving henceforth was
to be referred to not as an historian, but
merely as an author.

A few years earlier, after breaking off his
physics studies, this
son of a naval officer had come to public
attention with a book on the
destruction of Dresden, which portrayed the
bombing raid as a war crime. The book, based on
eye-witness accounts and on documents largely
unknown at that time, triggered a debate which
is still raging today. The book was a
best-seller and established Irving's reputation
as a tireless researcher of sources, who
drilled
deep into the remotest archives and brought
to the surface, thanks often to his contacts
with somewhat obnoxious circles, new materials
including the
diaries of Hitler's "personal physician"Theodor Morell, which Irving discovered
in a cardboard box in the U.S. National
Archives.

Even
highly-regarded historians who criticize his
writings for having become increasingly
tendentious over the years agree that he has a
magnificent nose for things, and that --
whatever their reservations about his
interpretation of the facts -- their profession
cannot ignore his books, as Andreas
Hillgruber wrote in his review of Hitler
und seine Feldherren [Ullstein,
1975]. Gordon
Craig confirmed that Irving has a deeper
knowledge of National Socialism than most
professional historians, and criticized that
students of the Hitler era owe more than they
are willing to concede "both to his energy as a
researcher and to the scale and the élan
of his publications".

As though driven by an impulse to
self-destruction, he has undergone a Rake's
Progress from the "controversial historian" as
which he was once seen, to "a discredited
historical writer" and a "Nazi apologist and
polemicist". Numerous countries have declared
him persona non grata; in Austria he was
sentenced to three years' jail under a law
against "reactivation along National Socialist
lines" on account of the doubts he expressed in
lectures, as to the existence of gas chambers;
no respected publishing house is willing to
publish his books.

Ideology alone cannot explain this
development of this Querkopf, this member
of the Awkward Squad. He has gone astray in a
defiant mixture of pride and self-pity, of
sensation-seeking and self-publicity. In his
1981
book on the Hungarian Uprising, which in his
obsessive preoccupation
with the Jews he gratuitously portrays as an
anti-Semitic popular uprising against a
Jew-dominated dictatorship, he writes of the
prime minister Imre Nagy that his brain
was "was bulging with an untidy mélange
of ponderous facts and theories."

The same seems to hold true for David Irving,
who turns seventy on Easter Monday.